Solana (SOL) processes roughly 70 million transactions per day and recorded over $143 billion in month-to-month DEX quantity as of Oct. 30, in response to DefiLlama.
The community operates with 1,295 consensus validators throughout 40 nations, and a Nakamoto Coefficient of 20, in response to the Basis’s June 2025 Community Well being Report. Manufacturing throughput runs at roughly 1,100 transactions per second.
The throughput enhancements adopted a five-hour outage in February 2024. The occasion prompted the Solana ecosystem to introduce measures equivalent to stake-weighted High quality of Service (QoS), checks with the Firedancer consumer in hybrid type, and adjusted validator economics by means of precedence payment routing.
Transaction quantity and execution mannequin
DeFiLlama information exhibits Solana’s spot month-to-month DEX quantity at roughly $143 billion as of Oct. 30. Ethereum’s quantity in the identical interval reached almost $138 billion.
Nevertheless, Ethereum’s base layer processes fewer than 1.2 million transactions per day, whereas Solana processes over 70 million.
Ethereum routes most DeFi exercise to layer-2 rollups that batch transactions earlier than selecting the bottom layer. Solana executes all transactions on a single layer.
Jake Kennis, senior analysis analyst at Nansen, attributes Solana’s exercise to infrastructure and market catalysts.
In a be aware, he acknowledged:
“Solana’s runtime did the laborious work first: Sealevel’s parallel execution, sub-second blocks, stake-weighted QoS over QUIC saved latency low and charges steady below load. That design prevented rollup-style fragmentation and delivered ‘one venue, one pockets, one mempool’ buying and selling.”
Market catalysts included Jito airdrops in 2023, Jupiter airdrops in 2024, memecoin exercise by way of Pump.enjoyable, and pockets integrations from Phantom, Jupiter, and Uniswap.
Price construction and congestion response
Solana fees a set base payment of 0.000005 SOL per signature plus non-obligatory precedence charges. Through the early 2024 memecoin surge, transactions failed regardless of customers paying precedence charges.
Model 1.18 carried out stake-weighted High quality of Service, allocating block house proportional to validator stake. Messari’s report for the second quarter of final 12 months documented congestion discount following SQoS deployment.
The payment mechanism stays native slightly than world. Helius and Eclipse Labs documentation clarify that Solana’s parallel transaction scheduler doesn’t uniformly value inclusion throughout all validators primarily based on precedence charges paid.
Customers can overpay or underpay relative to the precise community load. SIMD-96 routes all precedence charges to validators, altering income distribution however not the native pricing construction.
Moreover, Jito’s July 2025 TipRouter improve permits validators to distribute precedence charges to stakers alongside protocol-defined staking rewards.
The Basis’s June 2025 report signifies that validator whole income (REV) is rising, whereas breakeven stake necessities are declining. Most stake beforehand ran on Jito’s MEV-auction infrastructure, concentrating on extraction.
SIMD-96 and consumer range are redistributing this surplus. Kennis famous:
“Fewer single-stack dependencies imply fairer execution. Diversification might redistribute surplus: customers acquire by way of tighter spreads, LPs see sooner arbitrage, and validator margins compress as tip income competes down.”
Jupiter Extremely V3 and related aggregators scale back dangerous MEV whereas preserving arbitrage alternatives.
Shopper implementation and outage historical past
The Feb. 6, 2024, outage lasted 5 hours and originated from a bug within the Simply-in-Time compiler utilized by the Agave consumer.
All validators ran both Agave or Jito’s fork, requiring a coordinated community restart. The Basis’s autopsy documented the failure.
Firedancer, developed by Soar Crypto in C++, entered testing in hybrid “Frankendancer” mode, the place Firedancer handles consensus and networking whereas Agave manages execution.
The Basis’s June 2025 report notes dozens of validators working Frankendancer. Lab checks demonstrated 1 million TPS.
Two extra purchasers are below improvement, Mithril in Go and Sig in Zig.
Kennis defined:
“Shopper range hardens the community and opens efficiency headroom. Firedancer and Frankendancer have proven ~1M TPS in checks; real-world good points rely upon rollout. Even with broader validator geography, QUIC and SW-QoS maintain constant throughput.”
Electrical Capital’s 2024 Developer Report ranked Solana first by way of new developer additions, with roughly 7,625 new builders that 12 months.
Ethereum retains essentially the most intensive absolute developer base. Solana Cellular Stack integrates pockets, safety, and browser performance into Android {hardware}. Helium migrated its decentralized wi-fi community to Solana for on-chain settlement.
Ethereum comparability
Ethereum’s base layer processed fewer than 1.2 million transactions per day in current durations whereas reaching comparable DEX quantity to Solana.
The distinction is transaction compression by means of rollups. Arbitrum, Base, and Optimism batch a whole bunch of transactions right into a single base-layer submission.
Token Terminal information exhibits that Ethereum’s EIP-1559 base payment declined in 2025 as Layer 2 exercise decreased demand on the bottom layer.
Solana’s mounted base payment, mixed with precedence charges, generates decrease per-transaction income however larger transaction counts. Complete payment income is determined by sustained transaction quantity.
Solana’s monolithic mannequin avoids cross-rollup bridging and maintains unified liquidity. The trade-off is larger validator {hardware} necessities and tighter coordination wants.
Ethereum’s rollup mannequin distributes operational complexity to Layer 2 operators, however it fragments liquidity and introduces belief assumptions associated to sequencers.
Monitoring factors
Firedancer adoption charge will decide whether or not Solana achieves consumer range earlier than the subsequent community stress occasion. Full Firedancer deployment might allow larger throughput if validators migrate from Agave.
Price-market enhancements by means of SIMDs ought to tighten the correlation between precedence charges paid and the pace of transaction inclusion.
SIMD-96’s payment routing to validators mixed with consumer range will take a look at whether or not validator margins compress as Kennis predicts, or whether or not throughput good points offset margin strain.
MEV economics post-diversification will present whether or not aggregators efficiently scale back dangerous extraction whereas sustaining arbitrage effectivity.
If validator tip income turns into extra aggressive throughout a number of consumer implementations, staker APRs might stabilize at decrease ranges.
The info will present whether or not Solana’s parallel execution, sub-second finality, and unified liquidity mannequin can scale with out the multi-layer fragmentation Ethereum adopted, or whether or not base-layer coordination constraints finally drive related architectural modifications.
